Re: On Recovered Memories

When you say, "these false memories", I don't know which false memories you mean. False negative or false positive? Deliberate or non-deliberate distortions? The term "recovered memories" is by no means synonymous with the term "false memories", as familiarity with the above mentioned literature will instruct. But let's talk about deliberate and non-deliberate distortions in memory.

I had someone try to fake an EMDR session with me on some symptoms that I believe were an obvious attempt at an insurance scam -- I had been asked by the automobile insurance company to offer EMDR on a motor vehicle accident case, and I suspected, though initially wasn't sure, that the woman was faking PTSD. I offered the EMDR as requested, and the patient couldn't fake the EMDR processing properly at all, and the outcome of her EMDR was laughably atypical. That's in the case of a deliberate distortion, an expression I prefer over the ambiguous phrase "false memories".

In the case of non-deliberate distortion, where the client is doing his/her best, and where the clinician is appropriately neutral and has cautioned about the possibilities of memory distortion (which are no different in EMDR conditions than non-EMDR conditions), in some cases the distortions may disappear as in the case I described, above. Because we are focusing on symptom relief instead of fact finding, however, the good-faith client's processing will just go where it truthfully needs to go and resolve well, in many cases.

In the case of a bad therapist who has led and suggested "memories" that weren't previously there, I don't know what would happen, never having been in that situation. I would think it would be confusing and go no where, because how that the train progress down the track when the tracks are in thin air?

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